ruslan

> Kogan TVs are produced by Kogan.com, an Australian company founded by Ruslan Kogan in 2006.

That's not me for sure. :) But what I'm sure about it that their TVs are made either by Haier or TCL.

Mine did not have that option. There was some "demo" mode though, but it was useless.

Recently I've had to deal with this same problem - get a new TV for living room. Personally, I do not watch TV at all, but kids want to see cartoons when having their breakfast. I spent a week reading forums and came to conclusion that best solution would be to buy a "dumb TV" and connect it to a PC I trust, but it appears there are no dump TVs in my rage of 55" and larger. So, I bought "Google TV" based TCL.

When I brought it home, I never connected it to Ethernet or WiFi. Instead, I connected it to my laptop over USB, then using adb I uninstalled almost every application from it. It took me quite some time to figure out what app is possible to remove and what should be kept to let TV functionality to work. I even had to factory-default it a couple of times because some random apps I removed were crucial for Android to work. :) I think it took me 5-6 hours to clean it. Now it has only basic TV functionality like any dump TV does, I can watch air and cable TV channels, watch movies and play music from USB storage. If there's a need to watch something online, I connect it over HDMI to my small mini-PC that runs FreeBSD. I think I'm satisfied with the result. :-)

PS: Yesterday I opened the case and disconnected WiFi antenna. Just in case.

Can someone please tell why Linux kernel needs this "early" memory allocator and what happens when kernel switches to standard allocator ? From what I know FreeBSD (and other BSDs?) has Universal Memory Allocator (UMA) that is used for everything.

I would prefer to have Delta Chat like app that uses email (SMTP/IMAP) as transport instead.

I wish these guys luck in finding their customer. Really. Because real solution to the problem would be to hire old-style developers to rewrite the whole slop from scratch without AI being involved. Fixing broken slop is Sisyphus's labor.

I would expect CDE (or NsCDE).

Cannot find what are the min HW requirements ? What min RAM/HDD/CPU to get simple X11 environment ? Will it run on 486DX2-66 ?

> Fastmail reads or analyzes users email to sell ads? Fastmail trains ai models on their user's email messages?

Even though they have not been caught, it does no mean they are not doing so. We live in the world of zero trust.

> Metadata is more valuable than message content for analysis. GPG solves that how?

In most cases yes, only From: and To: headers are exposed.

Delta Chat is an email client I use and advise to my correspondents, it does GPG stuff quite comfortably. Yet it still requires understanding of the process.

> The second is AI assistance: tools that summarize your inbox, surface action items, draft replies, and in some cases take actions on your behalf.

That is the most evil part. Finally we will have bots talking to bots, no human in the loop.

All email problems can be solved with GPG, but that ruins Fastmail and other email services business, as they won't be able to read and analyze their users' emails. No ads, no selling user profiles to ad companies, not even teaching AI on user data. This is the kind of future of email I would like to see. Sadly, noone uses GPG and it's quite hard to teach people to do it.

I think I know quite some things about OS internals, but not that much as a guy how writes device drivers daily. Would happily read such book to get in par with the author.

> This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile.

I won't be that radical, the book still has value. There are many useful code samples with descriptions and explanations of concepts I did not know before. But to get to them one has to dig through a forrest of useless tokens. Someone has to pass it through an LLM and publish distilled edition. :-)

> This book is a dishonest AI scam.

Indeed! I read through a couple of paragraphs. Each begins with a bloated introduction where each sentence repeats same idea many times in different words. Lot's of bullets repeating same statement. That's exactly how LLM scam looks like. The whole book is full of water. It can be reduced in size by a factor of 5.

How about demo-design ? I mean good old PC demoscnece. Try to fit something feasible into 64K.